When you remove fear & coffee from the equation, what is your reason to do anything?

Some thoughts and a stab at a solution (though not a satisfying one at that!)

This is something I’ve been exploring recently.

First, a bit of background.

Fueled by fear and caffeine

I originally went to medical school in the UK straight from high school. I completed it and after 6 years I started working as a doctor. This was entirely on auto-pilot. A case of doing what was expected of me and not really thinking about it.

After a few years, I started to feel a dissatisfaction so I decided to leave to figure out what I really wanted to do. This led me to entrepreneurship — a worthy cause for sure.

Leaving a medical career is not something that is done lightly and traveling around the world, making piles of cash was exciting.

However, I know now that my initial driver was fear. And it was potent and even exhilarating.

The last thing I wanted to do was go back to my old life and so I was terrified of this eventuality. This drove me forward.

Then in 2021 once I achieved financial security— all of my motivation suddenly disappeared.

This left me confused and given that my business was making good money, I trundled on for another year or so, using ever-increasing amounts of coffee and Adderall to fuel my efforts and get me through the days.

Dark Energy

Here’s the thing — stimulants like caffeine are more powerful than we give them credit for. They provide us with a ‘dark energy’, similar to that provided by fear or the desire to prove someone to someone. This energy allows us to do things we are indifferent to or even actively dislike.

Think about the office worker doing a job they hate, using coffee to get through the day and then alcohol and cheap dopamine to offset the anxiety and get through the evening.

Caffeine also has the ability to give an inflated meaning to whatever is in front of us, regardless of why we’re doing that thing and so a few months ago I decided to give up stimulants. They were pushing me to burn out and I wanted to operate in a fundamentally different way.

Cheap dopamine is the answer

I asked myself “What would I CHOOSE to do each day if I didn’t have coffee?”

I no longer had fear to drive me forward.

I had freed myself from the external validation that I got from making money.

Now, I no longer had caffeine to allow me to bludgeon through whatever was put in front of me.

Initially, I felt totally lost, immediately reaching for cheap dopamine to distract myself from the discomfort.

My self-worth was entirely based on what I was doing or achieving and suddenly that had been taken away.

This was an identity crisis in the most fundamental form.

I literally didn’t know what to do with myself.

Potential solutions?

On sharing these feelings I realized that perhaps this crisis of meaning and purpose was more widespread than I thought.

In fact, I had also stumbled across this concept in a few books I’d read in the past though at the time the information was not relevant so hadn’t stuck.